NFL Flag Football May Be a Kid's Game, But ESPN Gives It the Pro Treatment The league's new kinder, gentler entry features plenty of audio, MindFly camera close-ups By Dan Daley, Audio Editor Friday, July 19, 2024 - 7:00 am
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In Haribo's football-themed gummi commercial, hulking NFL wide receivers Donald Driver and Marquez Valdes-Scantling wax blissful over the chewy treats in the squeaky voices of little kids in a candy store. This week, ESPN is working on presenting its own version of that theme for the NFL's first outing of its kid-centric NFL Flag Football initiative. Production of the games, scheduled to take place July 19-21 at the Pro Football Hall of Fame's Tom Benson Stadium in Canton, OH, will put the no-contact sport on a par with an actual NFL game, complete with tons of microphones and up-close video from MindFly AI BodyCams on two game officials.
The network will be broadcasting from Game Creek Video Spirit A and B units (a regular presence on the college-football circuit). It will be a full-production show, airing 18 Flag Football games over three days across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN+, NFL Network, NFL+, YouTube, Disney Channel, and Disney+. The broadcaster will have a crew of 170 production and operations staffers onsite, with others located in at its Bristol, CT, facility.
Kid Stuff But as full-on as the production aims to be, there is another overriding emphasis.
A1 Steve Yoder: It's about keeping it a kid's game but taking it to a professional broadcast-sports level.
We want to keep it fun, says A1 Steve Yoder, who will alternate game-mixing duties on the first two days with audio guarantee Tad Wymer, who will also be managing the RTS ADAM comms system. It's about keeping it a kid's game but taking it to a professional broadcast-sports level. We're going to have mics on coaches and things like that, so we can get inside the game.
Although the players will not be wired for sound - NFL Flag athletes are girls and boys age 5-17 - the coaches will be miked. Referees will be wearing MindFly AI BodyCams, described as smaller than a credit card and fitted with integrated microphones mounted inside a vest. The camera, battery, and transmitter are protected by D30 Decell padding to prevent injury to the wearer.
In addition, the production will have fixed Audio-Technica AT835 shotguns, movable parabolic microphones with DPA 4061 capsules held by A2s along the sidelines, microphones mounted on handheld RF cams and a Steadicam, and Shure VP88 stereo crowd-capture mics placed at the equivalent of a standard NFL playing field. ( Equivalent because, at 70 yards long and 30 yards wide with two 10-yard end zones, the Flag Football field is about two-thirds the size of a typical 100- x 53.3-yard NFL field). That, says Yoder, will make field-effects sound capture easier.
You're not going to get the sounds that you get from adults on the field, he explains, but the field's so much smaller that we can isolate the sounds a lot better. The smaller the field gets, the more we can pick and choose the sounds and decide what it is we want to hear.
Tricky Sound Capture Microphone choice is important. With no contact crashes taking place on the field and no marching bands to fill out the soundscape, most of the sound will come from the kids themselves as they play. That does change Yoder's frequency strategy a bit.
Because there won't be pad hits, what we're going to do is use the [parabolics] to pick up the kids' voices. We're also going to have to round out the sound a lot more, he explains, noting that the choice of the DPA microphone in the parabs helps add high-end crispness to the overall sound. We won't peak certain [frequencies] like you do to have pad hits and helmet hits. We'll tweak [upper frequencies] a bit more so that you clearly hear the kids screaming to each other and yelling and high-fiving and all that stuff.
Officials Wired for Video and Sound The inaugural NFL Flag Football production, part of the league's pivot to de-emphasize football's physical ferocity, will feature another relatively recent innovation as well. The MindFly BodyCam is an AI-stabilized POV camera with a built-in microphone and was also deployed by ESPN for United Football League (including the UFL Conference Championship), for one NHL Stanley Cup pregame skate, and on the first-base umpire for the College World Series. The system transmits in the 5 GHz or 6 GHz Wi-Fi spectrum, locating two receivers on the field and one at the midfield camera position in the stands.
For Flag Football, the league has authorized two MindFly Referee Cams. The RF chest-mount cams will be worn by a back judge and a side judge, giving viewers the perspective on what officials see and hear in real time.
In addition, the production's 12 total cameras will include Drone Cam, shooting live game action starting on Saturday; the Goodyear Blimp, providing aerial coverage also beginning on Saturday; and an RF handheld covering the sidelines.
MindFly can deliver the feed to the cloud, but ESPN is taking a baseband 1080p/59.94 feed onsite. Two camera feeds are transmitted to the broadcaster's Bristol facility as part of its REMI mux. MindFly is used primarily for replays and bumps, but the production team could take it live at any point.
Setup is good, transmission has been solid, the stabilization is outstanding, [the] pictures are good, and the wearability is pretty much the best, opines ESPN VP, Production Phil Orlins of the MindFly cam, adding that its integration into a vest makes its wearers more approachable, which can translate into engagement on screen. Take 10 minutes to cut the hole in the jersey and put the camera through and forget you're wearing it. I
